On 8/11/2015 1:02 PM, Cindy Hansen wrote:

We are beginning our build for a Employee Health software that will basically enable us to go paperless.  Do those who currently have electronic Employee Health / Occ/Med files have any protocols or guidance to share regarding transition from paper to electronic and then what about the BBF files that are required to be kept for 30years.  If it is all electronic and you decide to upgrade or change systems what then? 

 

Cindy Hansen, RN, MSN, CCM, CSIWCP

Employee Health Manager

Cindy,

I'm certain that any vendor of electronic medical recordkeeping systems will be happy to advise and assist you in the transition from paper to electronic records. We have software customers, for example, who have made a 100% switch and no longer store any paper records: although paper documentation is still relatively common, all "hard copy" records are scanned and stored in each Employee's electronic record for future retrieval and viewing when necessary.

As for keeping records for 30 years, it's anybody's guess what data management systems and storage media will be available in the year 2045. Back in 1980, customers would ask whether my software would be capable of storing records for the duration of employment plus 10 or 20 or 30 years for an employee who was hired at age 18 and ended up working for 40 years for the same hospital. At that time MediTrax, like every other employee health database solution, was DOS-based -- and we were using 5-1/4" floppy diskettes for most storage. I would hold up one of those "floppies" and admit I didn't know how we'd be storing records 70 years in the future -- but it certainly wouldn't still be on floppy diskettes.

As you know, hospitals change administrations (and recordkeeping systems) all the time, and more than a few electronic databases have become obsolete or unsupported or unable to maintain HIPAA-compliant confidentiality in the past 35 years. My advice would be:
  1. The primary goal is to ensure you're using a data system which maintains the absolute confidentiality of employee medical information. That means more than simply establishing a policy that unauthorized access will be punished by discipline or termination: we frequently discover hospitals which store confidential employee medical information in enterprise-wide databases designed for storing patient information or personnel/payroll data. The rationale for storing such data in a system which is accessible by coworkers is usually that "hospital administration says it's a business necessity." But HIPAA says you must prevent (not simply prohibit or punish) data access by individuals who have not been given permission by the employee whose information it is.

  2. The second goal is to ensure you're entering and saving your data in a consistent, accurate, efficient (easy to use), and extractable (portable) format, so that all data are entered in a reliably consistent manner and saved in a format which enables data tables to be exported to (for example) spreadsheets or text files for conversion into whatever recordkeeping system is in use many decades in the future.

If you're interested in reading more about the subject, you might consider obtaining a copy of Dr Roderick Neame's excellent 2012 book Health Informatics.

Regards,

Joe Fanucchi
--
Joe Fanucchi MD FACOEM
President and Medical Director
MediTrax / OHS, Inc.
MediTrax software: Everything you need, at a fraction of the cost!
o:925-820-7758
c:925-368-3367